s progress has been reached by warfare. In
modern times the peace of Europe is only maintained by the equality
of power to coerce by force. Liberty in England, gained first by an
exhibition of force, would have been lost but for bloodshed. The great
American Republic owes its existence and the preservation of its unity
to this inevitable means, and neither arbitration, moral persuasion,
nor sentimental argument would ever have exchanged Philippine monastic
oppression for freedom of thought and liberal institutions.

The right of conquest is admissible when it is exercised for the
advancement of civilization, and the conqueror not only takes upon
himself, but carries out, the moral obligation to improve the condition
of the subjected peoples and render them happier. How far the Spaniards
of each generation fulfilled that obligation may be judged from these
pages, the works of Mr. W. H. Prescott, the writings of Padre de las
Casas, and other chroniclers of Spanish colonial achievements. The
happiest colony is that which yearns for nothing at the hands of
the mother country; the most durable bonds are those engendered by
gratitude and contentment. Such bonds can never be created by religious
teaching alone, unaccompanied by the twofold inseparable conditions
of moral and material improvement. There are colonies wherein equal
justice, moral example, and constant care for the welfare of the
people have riveted European dominion without the dispensable adjunct
of an enforced State religion. The reader will judge the merits of
that civilization which the Spaniards engrafted on the races they
subdued; for as mankind has no philosophical criterion of truth, it is
a matter of opinion where the unpolluted fountain of the truest modern
civilization is to be found. It is claimed by China and by Europe, and
the whole universe is schismatic on the subject. When Japan was only
known to the world as a nation of artists, Europe called her barbarous;
when she had killed fifty thousand Russians in Manchuria, she was
proclaimed to be highly civilized. There are even some who regard
the adoption of European dress and the utterance of a few phrases in
a foreign tongue as signs of civilization. And there is a Continental
nation, proud of its culture, whose sense of military honour, dignity,
and discipline involves inhuman brutality of the lowest degree.

Juan de la Concepcion, [1] who wrote in the eighteenth century,
bases the Spaniards' righ